Adventures of Chris

https://youtu.be/z-HYJx5XXYs Uninterested in it's own protagonist immediately places the player on the back foot to make the extra effort to engage with their character while the game mocks and insults them.

Recommended - it mixes a lot of the 1990s platformer mechanics into a simple, humble game. For example, the most prominent inflating-deflating-floating mechanic seems inspired by the much simpler Fat Mario mechanic in Super Mario World. You have the fist attack from a lot of Nintendo-hard NES games such as Nightmare on Elmstreet and the various projectile attacks that remind me of Mega Man. At the very beginning when Chris has zero power-ups, the game resembles Lester the Unlikely while it makes fun of Chris being woefully out of shape to the point of crushing a ledge under his weight. The characterization is pretty good. I find that recurring Count Junior stomping animation quite amusing. The game is not particularly challenging even on normal and has two easier difficulty levels if you like it casual. Just try the demo if you are unsure. The late game gets worse as the level design starts relying on instant death laser traps, bosses with gross amounts of health ("Recommended" difficulty and layouts that require a heavy utilization of the special moves that are difficult to use accurately due to control sluggishness. The plot does not change from the beginning to the end. You save the kid and fight Count Junior, the end. That adds to the "mandatory obstacle course" feel BY A LOT.

NO chris no good.

I'm not quite done with this yet but I intend to finish it. This one surprised me, honestly. It takes a lot for a platformer to hook me in and this would have lost me if it wasn't immediately kind of mean spirited funny while simultaneously being genuinely whimsical and playing entirely by its own rules in terms of storytelling. The gameplay, especially at first, had me worried because (for lack of a better way of putting it at the moment) it felt kind of "cheap," but it also grabbed me before long after I started unlocking new abilities and came to terms with how it made up for its shortcomings. By that I mean that despite kind of janky hitboxes and sometimes less than perfect controls, the game never feels intensely frustrating since deaths are mostly inconsequential aside from a reset to the beginning of the room you died in, and the challenges are extremely reasonable. The boss fights are distinct and each level asks something slightly different of the player so it never feels boring. In addition, even the hidden stuff to find in each level honestly doesn't feel like much of a chore and it all becomes easier to accomplish as you progress through the game. Add to that some fun dialogue and amusing characterizations of both good and bad guys, and it's really just overall a pleasant and quality experience. I see that the developer has another title out and I absolutely just added it to my wishlist based on my time with this one.

Silly game with some interesting mechanics. It's a cool 90s inspired platformer and has somewhat challenging puzzles. Story is all over the place and feels a bit forced. I can see why some may like it but it is not for me. Will still give it a thumbs up for being fresh, cool game!

Amazing game 10/10, would Chris again

This game was played in its entirety on a MacBook Air M1 8gb ram 7c gpu running MacOS Sonoma. There were no bugs or crashes throughout my time with the game. Most achievements unlocked at their appropriate times. Several unlocked upon a subsequent quit and relaunch of the game. TLDR: A sometimes fun game with a pretty good middle and level design, but an outrageously bad beginning and ending with a lot of annoyances along the way. The game may have a lot of nostalgia attached to it, but if you actually plan to play and complete this game, you should know what you are in for first. This is a very odd one for me. I struggled with whether or not to give this a thumbs up or down. A quick bit of history: Yes, this looks and plays like one of those old flash games you'd find on NewGrounds, Armor Games, or Kongregate. My efforts to research if a version of this game did exist on any of those old sites has proven fruitless. It did exist as an Ouya game (Remember the Ouya? If you don't, look it up, it's pretty interesting!) about 10 years ago. I see a lot of reviews for this game only have a few minutes played and no achievements. It's possible that these are just nostalgia posts from the time the game was on other systems and/or platforms. Unfortunately, though there were some great things to love about this game, a good deal of it is a terrible mess. The Positives: Graphics - These are unusually crisp and detailed, likely due to its flash game (adjacent) origin story. It definitely nails the feel and vibe you get of playing those older Flash games. I am not including animations here, see below. Audio - The sound effects are minimal and mediocre. The music tracks, on the other hand, were all pretty good in my opinion. I never really got tired of them which is a nice change of pace for me. Controls - Although this will also shortly be appearing in the negatives by proxy, you do in fact control your character very well. You get A LOT of abilities in this game, and they each get their own button (and it may take some time to get used to all of it), but Chris always feels responsive. Quality of Life - Shockingly good for a game of this type and style. Most deaths cost you a minute or less (and on bosses, almost no time at all), there are no run-backs, you can leave a stage at any time, you can save the game at any time, everything is tracked and there are abilities in the game to direct you to anything you have missed...really it's a nice long list of features here. Level Design - This was really great. I was surprised by the number of different locations and some of them feel quite large (though they are small by most Metroidvania standards). But they have a great design to them and you will really require all of your tools and wits to get through them. That's a lot of positives, so why is this getting a thumbs down? The Negatives: Hit Detection - This is a big one. I earlier said that the controls for Chris feel pretty good, and they do! But, unfortunately, how Chris interacts with the world with these very good controls is something else entirely. The biggest problem here is that the game veers wildly between being way too precise, and not precise in the slightest. It is often way too precise because common features like the coyote jump (wherein a player is granted a short time after walking off a platform to hit the jump button) are non-existent. The exact frame where the last pixel of your back foot leaves the platform, you fall. The exact frame a spike sprite intersects with a single pixel of your body, you die. If you belly slam onto a fan and the bottommost part of your bulging stomach does not hit the center of the fan, you die. This happens very often and it always feels bad. The game is also not very precise enough in its enemy sprite hit detection. Frequently, projectiles will be rotating or transforming somehow as they move towards you. And these changes can sometimes cause you to get hit or die, even if not a single pixel is intersecting. This is at its worst when you are fighting the bosses, as their projectiles will be more numerous and more deadly. There is frequently a color problem as well where the projectile (or permanent moving obstacle) will be extremely close in color to the background, making it very difficult to avoid hits. Animations - This is a weird one. Chris has tons of animations and they all look really good. The enemies on the other hand do not fare as well. The biggest problem here is that some enemies (including bosses) have only a few frames of animation, and there are ENORMOUS changes to the size and shape of the enemy as it animates. As an example, there is a large ice miniboss. It has a few attacks and animations to accompany those attacks. It also jumps a lot. When it jumps, it goes from its normal "default" sprite to a sprite with its arms outstretched. There is no wind-up or indication of this. It is, in one frame, on the ground with one sprite, and in the very next frame, it is airborne and it takes up a lot more space than it just did one frame ago. Almost all of your attacks are incredibly close ranged, so if you were punching or shooting this boss and it decides to jump, you have to hope that the new sprite is not hitting you. You're also supposed to be able to stealth past mummies if they aren't looking at you, but again, the sprites just change instantly and I gave up on trying to get past them without killing them. Rough on the Hands - This game expects you to play through it multiple times if you want to get all of the achievements. Each play through demands so much of your attention that it is very draining on the hands. This one really hurt the hands quite a bit. The levels are short, but intense, and you won't always get a moment to breathe and regroup. The Bosses - Some of the bosses can be great, but most are not. They are sort of a catch-all for all of the other negatives so far. They have the worst sprite issues. They are so random you cannot rely on patterns. Their hit detection, for their bodies and projectiles, are the least precise. Then you get the double bosses, and you might imagine that this makes everything roughly twice as bad. And you're right! The Alpha and The Omega - Okay, epic category name aside, I'm just talking about the start and end of the game. Namely, these are the worst parts. The start is worse than the end. You are put into a tutorial fight that you are supposed to lose. Except there is an achievement for winning it. You have no powers, you have no abilities, you can do almost nothing, but you have to hit this randomized awful boss twenty times (20!) while only taking up to two hits yourself. And when I say random, I do mean it. I recorded times where the boss did not stop moving for thirty seconds (just moving back and forth for 30 seconds) and also times where the boss just shot you for thirty seconds. It's maddening, it's horrible, it's outrageous. It's the first thing you do in the game. Go and see if you can find a video of someone doing it. One video exists that I have found of a person doing it on a much lower difficulty level. That was it. The Ending Secret Boss is not as bad as that first fight, but it's close. It's more or less a double boss, but it really leans into some of the worst habits the game has. The colors here are particularly bad, and the randomness is probably the worst in the entire game. Beating this made me feel as though I got lucky, not that I had gotten any better at the fight. Thanks for reading this far. I'll echo the TLDR again: A sometimes fun game with a pretty good middle and level design, but an outrageously bad beginning and ending with a lot of annoyances along the way. The game may have a lot of nostalgia attached to it, but if you actually plan to play and complete this game, you should know what you are in for first.

Best platformer/metroidvania I've ever played. Better than Hollow Knight YEAH I SAID IT

"Set in the greatest year ever, 1995, protagonist Chris is kidnapped, mocked and transformed into a balloon, but manages to escape by floating off on a global adventure. Driven by determination, superpowers such as fireballs, and most importantly cookies, Chris is on a mission to defeat the forces of villainy to save children from around the world and make it home in time for dessert. Inspired by ‘90s cartoons, Adventures of Chris is chock-full of humor and invigorating combat that players will use to transform Chris from a weak kid into the ultimate hero." Sagt alles :) Ich mag Chris. Im Sale für 2,49€ kann man bedenkenlos zuschlagen :)

Easy game worth a couple bucks to waste your time. Sometimes one doesn't want to play a game that requires a lot of thinking. This game is good for those times. But I would never spend more than a couple bucks on this.